Top 300 Anna Quindlen Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “But never fear, gentlemen; castration was really not the point of feminism, and we women are too busy eviscerating one another to take you on.”

— Anna Quindlen

152. “It’s so much easier, to learn to love what you have instead of yearning always for what you’re missing, or what you imagine you’re missing. It’s so much more peaceful.”

— Anna Quindlen

153. “Kids and violent TV, violent TV and violence, violence and kids. The only people missing from this discussion are the parents. Where are we? Gone. Abdicated.”

— Anna Quindlen

154. “Young men kill someone for a handful of coins, then are remorseless, even casual: Hey, man, things happen. And their parents nab the culprit: it was the city, the cops, the system, the crowd, the music. Anyone but him. Anyone but me.”

— Anna Quindlen

155. “I was good with being alone, always liked it, but there’s something about doing a job alone that you’ve always done with someone else that just doesn’t feel right. Maybe it’s like making Christmas cookies by yourself. There’s nothing wrong with it in theory, but you’re really supposed to be doing it with other people, and not just any other people.”

— Anna Quindlen

156. “I realized that, while I would never be my mother nor have her life, the lesson she had left me was that it was possible to love and care for a man and still have at your core a strength so great that you never even needed to put it on display.”

— Anna Quindlen

157. “We don’t do ambivalence well in America. We do courage of our convictions. We do might makes right. Ambivalence is French. Certainty is American.”

— Anna Quindlen

158. “Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work. Each time I look at my diploma, I remember that I am still a student, still learning every day how to be human.”

— Anna Quindlen

159. “Downtime is where we become ourselves, looking into the middle distance, kicking at the curb, lying on the grass or sitting on the stoop and staring at the tedious blue of the summer sky. I don’t believe you can write poetry, or compose music, or become an actor without downtime, and plenty of it, a hiatus that passes for boredom but is really the quiet moving of the wheels inside that fuel creativity.”

— Anna Quindlen

160. “The next day, eating a turkey sandwich with salt and mayonnaise, Rebecca decided Thanksgiving was the best holiday, although she had little to choose from: her family never celebrated Hanukkah but her father was militant about ignoring Christmas and insisted they spend December 25 eating Chinese takeout and going to the movies.”

— Anna Quindlen

161. “I can’t think of a single downside to motherhood now.”

— Anna Quindlen

162. “I sort of feel like it comes around again. That when you get to a certain age, when you’ve lived enough and you’ve got your friends to support you and your family to support you, you wake up one morning and think, yeah, I’m okay.”

— Anna Quindlen

163. “The age of technology has both revived the use of writing and provided ever more reasons for its spiritual solace. Emails are letters, after all, more lasting than phone calls, even if many of them r 2 cursory 4 u.”

— Anna Quindlen

164. “Like cellulite creams or hair-loss tonics, capital punishment is one of those panaceas that isn’t. Only it costs a whole lot more.”

— Anna Quindlen

165. “The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you’d never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.”

— Anna Quindlen

166. “There’s some muscle group around your shoulders that seizes up during the perfection dance and doesn’t let go until you are asleep, or alone. Or maybe it never really lets go at all.”

— Anna Quindlen

167. “New York City has finally hired women to pick up the garbage, which makes sense to me, since, as I’ve discovered, a good bit of being a woman consists of picking up garbage.”

— Anna Quindlen

168. “All of the qualities that you need to be a good opinion columnist tend to be qualities that aren’t valued in women.”

— Anna Quindlen

169. “I never think about issues when I’m working on a novel. Issues are things that happen to people in sufficient numbers to elicit widespread attention; in other words, they’re just life happening. That’s what I think about: life, and telling a story.”

— Anna Quindlen

170. “There’s something undeniable about the posture of a person trying not to acknowledge your existance.”

— Anna Quindlen

171. “When one of you wanted one life, and the other wanted something completely different, there was a technical term for that: irreconcilable.”

— Anna Quindlen

172. “Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition. – JAMES BALDWIN.”

— Anna Quindlen

173. “Raising a child is a little like Picasso’s work; in the beginning he did very conventional representational things. Cubism came after he had the rules down pat.”

— Anna Quindlen

174. “Fifty years ago, teachers said their top discipline problems were talking, chewing gum, making noise, and running in the halls. The current list, by contrast, sounds like a cross between a rap sheet and the seven deadly sins.”

— Anna Quindlen

175. “Dogs makes messes, it’s true, but they clean them up as well.”

— Anna Quindlen

176. “So you’re getting squeezed at both sides. You’re taking care of your mom and dad and you’re still doing caregiving with your kids, which is not easy. But I think overall, there’s a level of satisfaction that might be unparalleled.”

— Anna Quindlen

177. “I think there was a long period of time when we got real invested in a youth culture, and not coincidentally it was when the baby boomers, who let’s face it, take up a lot of space on the planet, were young.”

— Anna Quindlen

178. “Nearly everyone I meet expresses deep sympathy about the fact that I have never married. Sometimes I wonder why.”

— Anna Quindlen

179. “So much of what you take for granted is the bedrock of happiness.”

— Anna Quindlen

180. “You want to have fun with your kids, and no one has fun with someone who runs roughshod.”

— Anna Quindlen

Featured in: Fun Quotes

181. “There is something so settled and stodgy about turning a great romance into next of kin on an emergency room form, and something so soothing and special, too.”

— Anna Quindlen

Featured in: Romance Quotes

182. “This is why I had children: to offer them a perfect dream of childhood that can fill their souls as they grow older.”

— Anna Quindlen

183. “You’re like a cake when you’re young. You can’t rush it or it will fall, or just turn out wrong. Rising takes patience, and heat.”

— Anna Quindlen

184. “A fix-it man, they used to call it, when things still got fixed instead of just junked. If.”

— Anna Quindlen

185. “The Statue of Liberty is meant to be shorthand for a country so unlike its parts that a trip from California to Indiana should require a passport.”

— Anna Quindlen

Featured in: Country Quotes

186. “My most pronounced writing habit is trying not to write.”

— Anna Quindlen

187. “All of life like a series of tableaux, and in the living we missed so much, hid so much, left so much undone and unsaid.”

— Anna Quindlen

188. “Then one day we suddenly realized that we had been keeping him alive not because it was good for him, but because it was good for us, because it was too hard to make the decision to let him go. And in the joyful bargain between dog and person, that is the one unforgivable cheat.”

— Anna Quindlen

189. “I don’t do research for my novels. Obviously, in my other line of work as a reporter and a columnist, I’ve had the opportunity to get to know both social workers and TV talk-show hosts.”

— Anna Quindlen

190. “I go online all the time, I just don’t read about myself. I read a fashion website called Go Fug Yourself. I actually correspond with the Fug Girls and that’s great.”

— Anna Quindlen

191. “These are my words; this is their world, a world in which we can wear our gender on our sleeves, unabashedly, as we go about the business of thinking out loud.”

— Anna Quindlen

192. “I remember adolescence, the years of having the impulse control of a mousetrap, of being as private as a safe-deposit box.”

— Anna Quindlen

193. “I feel about exercise the same way that I feel about a few other things: that there is nothing wrong with it if it is done in private by consenting adults.”

— Anna Quindlen

194. “Not writing at all leads to nothing.”

— Anna Quindlen

195. “One of the useful things about age is realizing conventional wisdom is often simply inertia with a candy coating of conformity.”

— Anna Quindlen

196. “If you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.”

— Anna Quindlen

197. “If there is anyone who’s living the work of the New Testament, it’s the nuns of the Catholic church and not the Catholic hierarchy.”

— Anna Quindlen

198. “If we really feel like we’re comfortable in our own skins now, we have a longer period of time to live out that kind of third or fourth act of our life.”

— Anna Quindlen

199. “Writing seems to be the only profession people imagine you can do by thinking about doing it.”

— Anna Quindlen

200. “We’ve made hyper motherhood a measure of female success.”

— Anna Quindlen